Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

My Year Of Citation Studies, Part 3, Mary Whisner

Librarians' Articles

In this third installment examining citation studies, Ms. Whisner looks at five articles from each of a sample of twenty-three journals published in 1982, and discovers some surprising results.

My Year Of Citation Studies, Part 2, Mary Whisner

Librarians' Articles

In this second installment examining citation studies, Ms. Whisner looks at citation patterns of articles versus student works, as well as patterns across journals.

My Year Of Citation Studies, Part 1, Mary Whisner

Librarians' Articles

Ms. Whisner begins a year of exploring how legal scholarship citation counts are created and viewed. What works do authors actually cite? Which legal sources are included? She shares her findings here.

Externship Assessment Project: An Empirical Study Of Supervisor Evaluations Of Extern Work Performance, Margaret Reuter

Faculty Works

Field supervisors’ evaluations of their student externs are packed with lively stories. They deliver a fly-on-the-wall perspective, giving us color about the work entrusted to our students, the behaviors our students exhibited, and the enjoyment the attorneys reaped. The authors decided the evaluations were so fertile that they should be systematically scrutinized to seek meaningful, reliable insights about the extern experience, especially regarding the variety, complexity, and responsibility levels of their work. We also saw a prime opportunity to assess an externship program and find ways to improve it. Thus, the Externship Assessment Project was born. We deployed qualitative data …

State Of Tennessee V. Kevin E. Trent, Ben Raybin, Juliana Lamar

Belmont Criminal Law Journal

Student comments on the Tennessee Supreme Court decision “State of Tennessee v. Kevin E. Trent”. The central holding vacating the sentence in this case did not establish a new doctrine of law but merely reiterated the holding in Travis that the essential elements of the offense alone cannot justify denial of probation in a probation-eligible offense. The Trent decision should be viewed by trial judges and practitioners primarily as a reminder of that principal. On the other hand, the court broke some new ground in appellate review. Prior decisions established that appellate courts can only uphold a sentence if the …

The Gap Between Martinez And Davila: Serving The Next Generation Of Federal Habeas Corpus Cases, Lexie Ward

Belmont Criminal Law Journal

During the summer of 2017, the United States Supreme Court announced a decision in Davis v. Davila, which bars substantial claims of ineffective assistance of appellate counsel that have been procedurally defaulted. However, despite the merits of limiting the number of cases which were not diligently pursued by an inmate, the Court states its conclusion too broadly and now effectively bars a prisoner from bringing claims of significant trial error in front of any court. A prisoner’s claim that was not available until a trial-level appeal, and was then avoided due to ineffective post-conviction counsel, may now be dodged by …

#Iceoffourcampus: The Liability And Responsibility Of Colleges And Universities For The Educational Attainment Of Dreamers, David H.K. Nguyen

Belmont Law Review

This law review article will: (1) examine the current state of affairs in educational attainment of undocumented students, (2) examine the federal and state policies that impact higher education access to undocumented students, including, but not limited to, state legislation, state action, institutional policies, and federal executive orders, and (3) provide a history of the sanctuary movement, an examination of various campus sanctuary policies, and an analysis of the legality of this debate. By understanding this policy maze and the lack of federal intervention for comprehensive immigration reform, this background forms the foundation to examine the liability and responsibility of …

Capitán América: The Impact Of Trips On The Cultural Trade Balance In Latin America, Laurann Johnson Kirschner

Belmont Law Review

This Note will discuss the cultural implications of TRIPS-mandated copyright structures on developing countries in Latin America and suggest implementation of co-production schemes across the region which will capitalize on Latin American countries’ particular strengths in common language and cultural proximity. Part I will discuss the terms of TRIPS itself, and shed light on how it changed the landscape of trade in cultural goods around the world. In turn, Part II will demonstrate how TRIPS contributes to the homogenization of cultural goods consumption by making it increasingly expensive for developing countries to compete on the world market, thereby creating an …

Presidential Powers, Immunities, And Pardons, Alberto R. Gonzales

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article intends to clarify some of the more difficult legal issues in our nation’s separation of powers jurisprudence. In order to afford the President the flexibility and discretion necessary to discharge presidential duties, the courts are almost certainly going to recognize total immunity from the criminal process for the President with respect to official conduct. The treatment of unofficial conduct is less predictable. Based on precedent and our nation’s founding principles of equal justice and fairness, the courts are likely to hold that a sitting President is not above the law and thus does not enjoy immunity from criminal …

Feminist Judging Matters: How Feminist Theory And Methods Affect The Process Of Judgment, Linda L. Berger, Bridget J. Crawford, Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

Professor Linda Berger rejoins her Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court coauthors in this essay presenting feminism as the foundation for a developing form of rich, complex, and practical legal scholarship-the lens and the means through which we may approach and resolve many legal problems. First, this essay explores the intellectual foundations of feminist legal theory and situates the United States and international feminist judgments projects within that scholarly tradition. It next considers how the feminist judgments projects move beyond traditional academic scholarship to bridge the gap between the real-world practice of law and feminist theory. …

Rewriting Judicial Opinions And The Feminist Scholarly Project, Linda L. Berger, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Bridget J. Crawford

Scholarly Works

In this introduction to an online symposium on Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court, the editors of this groundbreaking project reflect on the journey and what remains to be done.

Joe Williams And Discourse Communities-The Journal Of Legal Writing Institute And Community Service, Terrill Pollman

Scholarly Works

Professor Pollman writes a tribute to The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute.

Gender Justice: The Role Of Stories And Images, Linda L. Berger, Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

In this book chapter, Professor Berger argues for thoughtful metaphor-making and storytelling in legal writing. Exploring legal rhetoric with an eye for gender justice, she argues metaphor and narrative shape perspective and ask the reader to join the writer in the imaginative work of seeing one thing as another. The same shift in perspective that leads to re-conception—a shift that takes advantage of metaphor and narrative’s ability to say what only they can say—is what writers aim to achieve when they use metaphor and narrative for feminist and social justice advocacy.

Book Review: Legal Persuasion: A Rhetorical Approach To The Science, Lori D. Johnson, Sarah Morath

Scholarly Works

In this piece written for Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, Professor Lori D. Johnson provides a compelling review of new publication co-authored by William S. Boyd Law Professor Linda L. Berger.

How Academic Support Professionals Can Better Support Lgbtq Law Students – And Why We Should, Sarah J. Schendel

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This short essay addresses the unique role that academic support professionals can play in supporting LGBTQ students.

Freedom In Structure: Helping Foreign-Trained And International Graduate Students Develop Thesis Statements By Component, Elizabeth R. Baldwin

Articles

This article explains how foreign-trained and international graduate students can use a thesis development template to find and articulate narrow, novel, non-obvious, and useful claims for their final, academic papers in law. These students, in particular, are in need of clear direction and methods for crafting well-developed claims (or thesis statements), given that many are non-native speakers of English who trained in different legal and educational systems with different expectations about what constitutes good academic writing—in any genre, let alone law. Through the use of a thesis development template (adapted from writing advice by Joseph M. Williams and Eugene Volokh), …

The Infinite Power Of Grammar, Patrick Barry

Articles

Good lawyers know that effective advocacy requires more than just choosing the right words; it also requires choosing the right word order. The formal term for this choice is “syntax.” But perhaps a better description comes from a 1976 essay by Joan Didion called “Why I Write.”

In it, Didion draws a helpful parallel between the arrangement of a photograph and the arrangement of a sentence. “To shift the structure of a sentence,” she notes, “alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of the camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” Didion refers …

Gender Disparity In Law Review Citation Rates, Christopher A. Cotropia

Law Faculty Publications

Gender disparity in scholarly influence – measured in terms of differential citation to academic work – has been widely documented. The weight of the evidence is that, in many fields of academic inquiry, papers authored by women receive fewer citations than papers authored by men. To investigate whether a similar gender disparity in scholarly influence exists in legal studies we analyze the impact of gender on citation to articles published in top 100 law reviews between 1990 and 2010. We find evidence of gender disparity in citation rates, but in surprising contrast to observations made in other disciplines, we observe …

Framing Failure In The Legal Classroom: Techniques For Encouraging Growth And Resilience, Kaci Bishop

Working Papers

This Article argues that law schools should endeavor to help students maximize their learning and their potential as attorneys by helping them accept and learn from failure.

Citation Literacy, Alexa Z. Chew

Working Papers

New lawyers and law students spend a lot of time worrying about legal citation. But most of that time is spent worrying about the wrong thing—formatting. The primary purpose of legal citation is to communicate information to the reader. Thus, legal citations are integral parts of the legal documents that lawyers read and write. But rather than viewing citation as communication, law students, and the new lawyers they become, tend to view it as a formatting sideshow dictated by the Bluebook or other citation style guides. This view is both inaccurate and counterproductive.

I argue that the reason for this …